University of Virginia Library

The Heroin Menace

A menacing nightmare has descended upon
the public schools of many of our nation's
cities heroin addiction. Apparently,
inner-city high schools are faced with the
problem of trying to educate a student body
in which as many as 40 or 50 per cent of the
students are heroin addicts, and the problem
is spreading to suburbs and small towns all
over the nation.

There is nothing more pathetic or
dangerous than a teen-aged drug addict; his
life is a total mess. He cannot learn because of
his habit, and he must turn to street crime or
crime within the school to support it. Any
high school with a sizable percentage of
addicts cannot function, and it is this
problem, more than any other, which prevents
ghetto residents from getting the kind of
education they need for a chance to break
free from the poverty cycle. Once it was
thought that poverty itself was the main cause
of addiction; but the spread of the problem to
the affluent suburbs casts doubt on that
theory.

Efforts to deal with the problem are
hampered by the appalling ignorance about
the sociological causes of addiction, a
disinclination by the government to provide
the funds needed for effective treatment of
addiction and the inability of law
enforcement agencies to take action at the
roots of the problem within organized crime.
The Federal Government has trumpeted its
concern about making the streets safe, but it
has attempted to do so by hitting the petty
junkie's crimes; meanwhile the FBI and the
CIA are more concerned with chasing
Communists than the purveyors and
wholesalers of heroin. At present, treatment
for addicts is primitive and under financed and
most addicts return to the streets with their
habits intact. Yet, as one of Mayor Lindsay's
aides pointed out, the cost overrun on the
C5A airplane alone would pay for the
treatment of every addict in New York.

College students have generally been leery
of acknowledging the extent of the heroin
problem because a crackdown on heroin
generally means a crackdown on hallucinogens
as well. Students, who may enjoy the use of
marijuana and never consider trying heroin,
say that there is no cause and effect
relationship between marijuana and heroin;
and it may be that border crackdowns on
marijuana which make it unavailable are a
cause of heroin addiction in that drug-prone
people turn to it when they cannot smoke.

But this country is at the point where it
can no longer afford any equivocation on the
question of drugs. Heroin addiction must be
destroyed before it destroys us. The case
against marijuana as a cause of addiction in
that it introduces the user to the drug culture
is especially strong in the ghettos. College
students may have the intelligence and the
achievement motivation to keep them from
going to heroin; a 14-year-old junior high
school student may not. And this society is
rapidly approaching the point where it can no
longer afford to quibble about uncertainties -
with whatever means prove necessary and
effective, addiction must be stopped.